I recently took a look at the container integration features in VMware Fusion v11.5.6 through the vctl command line feature. I was intrigued to read about a future feature coming in version 12, which included some Kind integration. For those of you unfamiliar with Kind, it is a way of deploying Kubernetes in containers. It might sound a bit strange, but it is actually very powerful, and is used by a lot of developers for many different use-cases. This post is going to look at vctl with this new Kind integration in VMware Fusion version 12. Let’s see how to…
To coincide with a new release of vSphere 7.0U1 and vSAN 7.0U1, there is also a new release of VMware Cloud Foundation releasing. This is VCF version 4.1. In this release, as well as a bunch of updates to the versions of the various VMware products that make up the VCF bill of materials, there are also some nice new enhancements. In this post, I’ll highlight the big features that I know a number of customers are interested in. Support for vVols as a Principal Storage for Workload Domains Virtual Volumes (vVols) is gaining more and more traction among VMware…
VMware has just announced the next release of their Hyper-converged Infrastructure product, vSAN 7.0 Update 1 (U1). In this post, I will cover some of the main big-ticket items that have been included in this release. You’ll notice quite a number of new features and additional functionality, and some of these have been requested for quite some time, so it is fantastic to finally see them in the product. vSAN File Services now supports the SMB protocol In vSAN 7.0, we announced support for vSAN File Services. In that release, we supported the creation of NFS volumes that could be…
This is something that I “spun my wheels” on a little bit last week, so I decided I’d write a short article to explain the issue in a bit more detail. This is related to the provisioning of a Persistent Volume on the Supervisor cluster of a vSphere with Kubernetes deployment. I had a local VMFS volume on one of my hosts, so I went ahead and tagged the volume using vSphere Tagging. I then built a tag-based storage policy so that when that policy is selected for provisioning, the objects that get provisioned would be placed on that local,…
Last week I updated my version of VMware Fusion to 11.5.6. If you don’t know about VMware Fusion, it is a VMware product that gives Mac users the ability to run guest virtual machines. One of the new features that I noticed was the inclusion of a new vctl utility (IIRC, it became available first in v11.5.5.). This is a command line utility for the Nautilus Container Engine which is now part of VMware Fusion. It allows you to work on OCI (Open Container Initiative) containers from your desktop. I decided to take a closer look, and do a few…
In this video, we look at how to create a Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) with the VM Encryption feature which can be used with vSphere CSI/CNS to create a Kubernetes Storage Class that encrypts Persistent Volumes. This feature is only available with the CSI 2.0 driver for native, upstream Kubernetes deployed on vSphere 7.0 (at the time of writing). You will also need to have a Key Management Server available to the vSphere host to create a policy that allows encryption. Finally, encrypted Persistent Volumes can only be attached to encrypted virtual machines, meaning that at least one of…
A short video explaining the role of the vSphere CSI (Container Storage Interface) driver and CNS (Cloud Native Storage) in both the vSphere with Kubernetes/Tanzu Supervisor Cluster and in the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Guest Cluster. This video discusses the role of the CSI driver in the Supervisor cluster, and the pvCSI driver (para-virtual CSI driver) in the TKG guest cluster. We also look at how the pvCSI communicates CNS control plane in the vCenter Server via the CSI driver in the Supervisor Cluster to request Persistent Volume operations on behalf of the Guest Cluster.